Thank god the holidays have ended. I like the holidays, but I’d had enough. I’d had enough shopping, I’d had enough eggnog, I’d had enough Y2Krisis “news,” I’d had enough “Deck The Halls” and “Auld Lang Syne,” and at the top of my list of New Year’s resolutions there appears a vow to hire an intern to wrap my Christmas presents next year, because for whatever reason, I suck at wrapping, and whether I have to wrap a book or a sweater or a shampoo bottle in the shape of Ace Frehley (don’t ask), the gift in question always looks like I ran over it with my car a few times. I should confess also that I did not write my list of resolutions down, because I can’t, because I wrote hundreds of Christmas cards, and the muscles in my right thumb bulked up to three times their normal size as a result, and then my thumb started dipping Skoal and wearing a little white backwards baseball hat and calling my other fingers “poindexters,” and I’d run into acquaintances at holiday parties and they’d say, “Hey, Sarah, what’s up?” and I’d say, “Oh, not much – trying to finish my Christmas shopping, my thumb turned into a frat thug, the usual,” and in fact I can only type the words you see before you because my thumb had to go pick up the kegs for Pledge Week.

Okay, no, not really, but I do feel an immense sense of relief at not having to spend so much time at the accursed post office. You know that suicide statistic that always gets trotted out around the holidays, the one that claims more people try to kill themselves at Christmastime than at any other time of year? I suspect that the people who attempt suicide during the Christmas season do so as a direct result of having visited the post office in my neighborhood, although they could save themselves the trouble by stopping by during the month of December and getting in line to mail a package, which in turn will cause them to die of old age.

My father likes to say that, when the federal government involves itself with a given project, it will inevitably make that project mediocre. I can’t disagree with that sentiment, generally speaking, and it’s tempting to apply the principle to my local PO, but in this case, the “local” element bears the lion’s share of blame for the Zip Code Of The Damned atmosphere that prevails at Murray Hill Station. Walking through the front door seems to occasion a fifty-IQ-point drop in ninety percent of the population, none of whom could spare it to begin with. I have seen grown men struggling to insert a dollar bill that resembles not US currency but rather a reconditioned Kleenex into a stamp-machine slot, and fighting back tears when the machine rejects the bill again and again. I have seen women who do not appear to suffer from any sort of developmental disability hold up Priority Mail envelopes and Express Mail envelopes and ask the clerk the difference between them. I have heard the words “what do you mean, ‘customs’ – Canada is a state, you moron” spoken in complete seriousness. I have watched as people shouted through their PO boxes at the postal clerks, “Hey! Hey, you! Do I have anything back there? Box 1506? Because I don’t see any mail in here,” as if the box functioned as some sort of communication apparatus instead of, um, a box. Where they would have put your mail. If you had any. Which, apparently, you do not. So shut up.

I have also stood on line many, many times at Murray Hill Station, and I can safely say that most human beings believe their behavior does not “count” if nobody they know personally has witnessed it. How else to account for the shamelessly thorough picking of ears, noses, and other bodily crevices? How else to explain the seventy-year-old man who felt inspired to sing tunelessly along with “Stop In The Name Of Love” as it piped down from the ceiling, and who did not neglect the little “stop” hand motions? How else to excuse the woman who snarled at an Asian clerk that he should learn to speak better English, “because I ain’t understood a word you sayin’”? Nobody ever has the forms they need when they get to the front, nobody ever stops to think for so much as thirty seconds about which forms they might need when they get to the front, nobody ever seems to remember how to operate a ballpoint when they finally get the proper forms (“oh, so I click this little springy thing, then?”), nobody grasps the fact that you cannot buy currency from other countries in a United States Post Office, or that you cannot bring a book in and weigh it and stick a mess of air-mail stamps directly on the book jacket and expect it to go anywhere, and then we have the graduates of the William Safire Charm School yelling at the Chinese-Americans, the old women standing in line for half an hour to buy a single stamp and counting out thirty-three cents in Confederate currency to pay for it, little kids trussing their baby sisters with packing tape, and the guy I inevitably wind up next to in line (I think he pays one of the clerks to alert him whenever I round the corner of Park Avenue), a former jazz pianist who makes me guess his age (seventy, but he looks twenty years younger, and if you think he’ll let that drop, think again) and then launches into the umpteenth in a god-knows-how-many-part lecture series on Famous Americans With Fascist Leanings, all delivered in a conspiratorial whisper, and since I’ve already attended many installments of the series, let me take this opportunity to inform the American public that anti-fascist freedom fighters stole the Lindbergh baby, but they accidentally dropped it on its head and it died, so they framed Hauptmann, and since Lindbergh didn’t want the press to get wind of his tortured affair with Hauptmann, he let Hauptmann fry. And have any of these lovely folks figured out that standing right behind me, their toes touching the heels of my shoes, their breath humidifying my neck, will not speed up the line? No. No, they have not.

But I have a secret weapon: Enrique. Enrique, who usually mans Window 3, has Coke-bottle glasses, sports a wide array of USPS tie tacks, and is a very friendly and helpful person. Enrique also loves to talk baseball. Whenever the git behind me has insinuated his mustache into my collar, and it looks like I’ll get Enrique as my clerk du jour, I smile a little smile to myself, and when Enrique calls me over, I saunter over, slap my package onto the scale, and ask him, “So, can you believe that Andy Pettitte – five hits!” Enrique then launches into a baseball disquisition of considerable length, and I encourage him and insert knowledgeable comments, and the git behind me huffs and fumes while I monopolize Enrique, and the git thinks he’s got a clear shot at Enrique when I get my change back, but no, I inquire as to Enrique’s opinion on the Mets infield and off he goes again, and the git shifts from foot to foot and sighs so loudly that it ruffles my hair.

The Postal Service takes a lot of guff, and they probably deserve a lot of it. I sent a tape to Gwen, and the box arrived at her house with no tape inside, which we both found sort of insulting – like, if you lose a package, lose all of it. (We did get a good laugh out of it, though, since some postal clerk probably thought it had porn on it and stole it, only to find a particularly stupid episode of 7th Heaven in long-play mode instead. That’ll teach those heathens!) On the other hand, Nip addressed a card to me by last name, street address, and city – no first name, no apartment number, and no zip code, mind you – and it got here from Columbus, Ohio in three days. A few of the clerks at Murray Hill Station could use a little work in the area of interpersonal relations, and I really wish they’d stop putting the yellow “package too large for receptacle” slip in my box, rustling around in a back room for fifteen minutes, and handing me a normal letter-sized envelope. But the problem doesn’t lie with the postal clerks. It lies with the customers. The customers don’t follow the posted instructions for mailing certain kinds of letters and packages. The customers don’t fill out their forms while waiting in line to save time. The customers don’t think the clerks merit the same courtesy other people do, because the clerks work in the post office. I’ve worked part-time as a records clerk for a couple of years now, and I’ve seen a few colossal fuck-ups by the USPS, but the same “garbage in, garbage out” rule that applies to computer programming applies to the post office. If you think you have the right to tear the postal workers a new one because they refuse to send a package UPS for you (true story, ladies and germs), then don’t act all shocked when one of them jumps on the counter and starts strafing you and everyone else in line with machine-gun fire, because you’ll deserve it, and I’ll step right over your bloody and lifeless form and discuss the finer points of pinch-hitting strategy with Enrique. Next!

Ladies and gentlemen, Enrrrrrrrique!

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